A common advertising model utilized on the Internet, in particular with search engine websites, involves a system of providing sponsored links. Sponsored links are paid advertisements that appear in addition to search results when users input keywords at search engine websites. For example, if a visitor to the search engine website enters the term “flowers,” advertisements that an advertiser believes may be relevant to someone searching for flowers are displayed with particular search results. The advertisements appear as a result of advertisers bidding on particular keywords, such as “flowers.” If multiple advertisers place bids on the same keyword, it is common for advertisements with the highest bids to be displayed when a visitor enters a search term that matches the keyword. Oftentimes, there is no limit on the number of search terms a particular advertiser may bid on.
The bidding process is commonly managed by an intermediary, such as a search engine website. Advertisers bid on keywords and submit advertisements associated with the keywords to the intermediary. The intermediary typically utilizes one or more databases for storing the advertisements, associating the advertisements with bids and keywords, keeping track of the highest bidders, scheduling, etc., and ensuring that at any given instance the advertisements corresponding to the highest bids are displayed when search terms matching the keywords are entered by the visitors to the search engine website. Whenever a visitor clicks on a displayed advertisement, the intermediary charges the advertiser a fee. The intermediary also commonly monitors the “click-through” rate (e.g., how many users actually select or click on the displayed advertisement). In some cases, if the number of visitors clicking on the advertisement is too low, the advertisement will no longer be displayed, even if it is associated with the highest bid.
Another variation of the above-described concept is to show the keyword-based advertisements on websites other than search engines' search result sites. For example, if a website contains information about flowers, then it is likely that visitors viewing the website may have an interest in advertisements related to flowers. Thus, the intermediary may provide special programs to which publishers of websites can subscribe. In such a program, the intermediary analyzes the publisher's website to determine a suitable keyword or set of keywords to be associated with the website, such as “flowers” in the above example. The intermediary selects from its database the highest bidder on the determined keyword or keywords and provides the appropriate advertisements for the publisher's website. This type of advertising program is beneficial to the publisher, since the publisher is not required to take action other than display the advertisements and collect monetary compensation for displaying the advertisements. The publisher may also receive monetary compensation each time a visitor of the website clicks on the displayed advertisement. This compensation model is often referred to as “pay per click.”
In some situations, the process of determining a suitable keyword or set of keywords to be associated with a website can be difficult, and often may not produce keyword advertisements that benefit visitors. In particular, a website may provide individual web pages containing content for a wide variety of subjects and that are typically accessed either without the use of keywords or with keywords that may not be helpful to determine appropriate advertisements for display on these web pages. For example, a publisher's website may contain web pages providing detailed information about various individual books for sale. The individual words taken from book titles often do not reflect the subject matter of the book to a degree that a meaningful selection of keyword advertisements may be provided for publication with the individual book detail web pages if these words are used as keywords to be associated with these web pages. It would be beneficial to provide a method and system for associating an advertisement with a web page that enables determination of keywords or set of keywords to be associated with individual web pages so that the associated keyword advertisements may provide greater benefit for visitors and maximize potential revenues for the intermediary.